Street Justice

IN THE aftermath of the verdicts in the Rodney G. King civil rights case, America will have to come to grips with the inconsistent, confusing and ultimately self-destructive signals that society sends to local police.From a purely legal perspective, the dominant factual issue in both of the trials of the four Los Angeles Police officers -- the state's trial last spring and the federal trial that ended Saturday with the convictions of two officers and the acquittals of two others -- was whether they used excessive force to subdue and arrest Mr. King.

Police commissioners have come and gone in Baltimore over the past decade - five, to be precise - but there's been one consistent face of the Police Department over the past 10 years: spokespeople Donny Moses and Nicole Monroe. On Friday, Moses and Monroe will serve their last day in the public affairs office, opting to return to street work. Moses, a longtime drug cop, will move to the warrant task force, while Monroe, a former shooting detective, will begin doing work with witnesses.

June 5, 2011 The body of 13-year-old Tywonde' Jones lay under a white sheet behind a decrepit vacant home in Northwest Baltimore. He had been stabbed and slashed 228 times. One-hundred and eighty-eight were puncture wounds, some as deep as six inches, piercing his skull, lungs, ribs, liver and kidney. He suffered injuries to his arms and hands as he tried to fend off the blows. Word quickly spread, and the boy's mother, Monica, frenzied and grief-stricken, rushed down to Cordelia Avenue in central Park Heights.

June 5, 2011 The body of 13-year-old Tywonde' Jones lay under a white sheet behind a decrepit vacant home in Northwest Baltimore. He had been stabbed and slashed 228 times. One-hundred and eighty-eight were puncture wounds, some as deep as six inches, piercing his skull, lungs, ribs, liver and kidney. He suffered injuries to his arms and hands as he tried to fend off the blows. Word quickly spread, and the boy's mother, Monica, frenzied and grief-stricken, rushed down to Cordelia Avenue in central Park Heights.

THE ESCALATING use of intimidation to silence witnesses in Baltimore City criminal cases is a significant threat to public safety. Every day in courtrooms across Maryland and throughout our nation, threats against and intimidation of witnesses put justice in jeopardy. In the late 1980s, the proliferation of a new drug of choice, crack cocaine, coaxed by a steady heroin market on Baltimore's street corners combined with an arsenal of illegal guns, created a surge in loosely knit, violent drug-trafficking organizations that used guns to dispense street justice.

Police commissioners have come and gone in Baltimore over the past decade - five, to be precise - but there's been one consistent face of the Police Department over the past 10 years: spokespeople Donny Moses and Nicole Monroe. On Friday, Moses and Monroe will serve their last day in the public affairs office, opting to return to street work. Moses, a longtime drug cop, will move to the warrant task force, while Monroe, a former shooting detective, will begin doing work with witnesses.

Here lies Earl Rodney Monroe Jr., rehabilitated to death by the Baltimore juvenile "justice" system. IF THERE is anything like truth in headstones, that's what Monroe's should say. The 15-year-old West Baltimore youth was fatally shot in early June, but not before running up an arrest record for drug dealing that saw police nab him 11 times before "street justice" - that term every bit as oxymoronic as "juvenile justice" - caught up with him. Sun reporter...

It happened this way.Around 2 a.m. on Friday, July 19, some girls came to Charlene Vandiver's door and said her son, Antonio Crossley, had been shot in the 700 block of Poplar Grove St."I jumped up and was on my way up there, but something said, 'Char, don't go up there.' God kept me back," Vandiver said Friday as she sat in a chair in the living room of her home in the 600 block of N.Dukeland St. A friend told her only a few minutes later that her oldest child, Tony, 18, was already dead.

IT IS NOT a crime to hate black people. Let's get that out of the way from the start. It might be morally reprehensible, as would any bigotry based on race, creed, color or any number of factors. It might even have been called a sin, back in the days when we had sin. But it isn't a crime. And the disturbing thing about Jacob Tyler Fortney and the other white men accused of killing Noah Jamahl Jones is that some folks believe that they hated black people, and they wanted them prosecuted for that -- not for what happened on the night of July 24, 2005.

Last week, a reputed 18-year-old drug kingpin, Anthony Jones, was arrested in East Baltimore. Police said a multi-million-dollar organization was organized when Mr. Jones was a juvenile and used children as young as 11 years old as street dealers.Over the last 20 years, according to prosecutors and police, local drug dealers have grown progressively younger and more dangerous, as the appetite of city drug addicts continues to switch increasingly from heroin to cocaine.During the reign of the "old school" traffickers -- mature adults -- heroin was Baltimore's drug of choice.

IT IS NOT a crime to hate black people. Let's get that out of the way from the start. It might be morally reprehensible, as would any bigotry based on race, creed, color or any number of factors. It might even have been called a sin, back in the days when we had sin. But it isn't a crime. And the disturbing thing about Jacob Tyler Fortney and the other white men accused of killing Noah Jamahl Jones is that some folks believe that they hated black people, and they wanted them prosecuted for that -- not for what happened on the night of July 24, 2005.

THE ESCALATING use of intimidation to silence witnesses in Baltimore City criminal cases is a significant threat to public safety. Every day in courtrooms across Maryland and throughout our nation, threats against and intimidation of witnesses put justice in jeopardy. In the late 1980s, the proliferation of a new drug of choice, crack cocaine, coaxed by a steady heroin market on Baltimore's street corners combined with an arsenal of illegal guns, created a surge in loosely knit, violent drug-trafficking organizations that used guns to dispense street justice.

Here lies Earl Rodney Monroe Jr., rehabilitated to death by the Baltimore juvenile "justice" system. IF THERE is anything like truth in headstones, that's what Monroe's should say. The 15-year-old West Baltimore youth was fatally shot in early June, but not before running up an arrest record for drug dealing that saw police nab him 11 times before "street justice" - that term every bit as oxymoronic as "juvenile justice" - caught up with him. Sun reporter...

It happened this way.Around 2 a.m. on Friday, July 19, some girls came to Charlene Vandiver's door and said her son, Antonio Crossley, had been shot in the 700 block of Poplar Grove St."I jumped up and was on my way up there, but something said, 'Char, don't go up there.' God kept me back," Vandiver said Friday as she sat in a chair in the living room of her home in the 600 block of N.Dukeland St. A friend told her only a few minutes later that her oldest child, Tony, 18, was already dead.

IN THE aftermath of the verdicts in the Rodney G. King civil rights case, America will have to come to grips with the inconsistent, confusing and ultimately self-destructive signals that society sends to local police.From a purely legal perspective, the dominant factual issue in both of the trials of the four Los Angeles Police officers -- the state's trial last spring and the federal trial that ended Saturday with the convictions of two officers and the acquittals of two others -- was whether they used excessive force to subdue and arrest Mr. King.

A century ago, downtown real estate deals were news as much as they are today. In November 1906, a compromise between church and state was struck on the future of Compromise Street. According to reports, the city of Annapolis filed for the condemnation of the waterfront property along Compromise Street with Justice of the Peace Charles G. Feldmeyer. Annapolis sought to secure the property title to extend the street to the bridge spanning Spa Creek to Eastport. The property was owned by the Redemptorist Fathers of St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church.